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HOST:

Welcome to AMERICAN MOSAIC in VOA Special English.

(MUSIC)

I'm Doug Johnson. This week, a special Valentine's Day program about love in hard economic times.

(MUSIC: "My Funny Valentine")

HOST:

Love is in the air this weekend as Americans celebrate Valentine's Day on Saturday, February fourteenth. For people who are still looking for their true love, there are several resources for finding a partner. Online dating services and dating experts are just two ways that the search for love has turned into a big industry. Barbara Klein has more.

(MUSIC: "Looking for Love")

BARBARA KLEIN:

Searching for love is no longer just a favorite subject for songs. It has also become a huge industry. Researchers say the online dating industry in the United States earned six hundred and forty-nine million dollars in two thousand six. They expect this number to increase to more than nine hundred million dollars by two thousand eleven.

(MUSIC: "Love For Sale")

Experts say that the industry has grown because traditional social ties in the United States have weakened. Many young people leave behind a close community of friends and family to find work in bigger cities. People work longer hours, so they have less time to meet new people. So they depend increasingly on technology.

This helps explain the popularity of online dating. Some estimates say one hundred twenty thousand marriages a year result from matches made on the Internet.

The dating industry has also been expanding in new and interesting ways. Many companies around the country offer personalized services for finding the perfect mate. These companies are answering a large demand by single people. They are willing to invest their time and money to find love with carefully planned methods, instead of leaving love to chance.

For example, AskRomeo is a company in Reston, Virginia. It provides single people with advice on how to meet a person for the first time and make a good impression.  

Also in Virginia, the company True Life Partners provides a more costly and detailed dating service. The company's owner, Stephanie Rockey, says her customers are busy professionals who do not have time to search for their life partner. Customers hire Miz Rockey's team of trained experts to help them find people they will like based on detailed information they provide about themselves.

The company says it is a team of professional personal recruiters who help couples meet. But this level of attention comes at a high price. Men pay thousands of dollars for the service. But women get to take part at no cost.

There are lots of other costs linked to dating. And we wondered how the economic recession has affected dating in the United States. So here is Doug Johnson with more.

(MUSIC: "I'm Yours")

 

HOST:

It appears that love still succeeds, even in times of economic crisis. The online dating Web sites Match.com and PerfectMatch.com both say that their membership numbers have increased greatly since the recession worsened in September. Match.com announced last year that the month of November showed the strongest increase in paid members in seven years.

Last year, PerfectMatch.com also reported that its memberships increased by forty-seven percent compared to earlier months in the year. And, the Web site says memberships this January were up thirty percent from the month before. A relationship expert on Perfectmatch.com says that dealing with bad news is hard when a person is alone. So, people spend more time online to find friends with common values and goals.

Online dating may have increased, but many single people have had to change their real-life dating activities to save money. For example, couples might choose to meet at a free museum instead of spending money on theater tickets or dance clubs. Jason Levergood in Washington, D.C. has a better idea than eating out at costly restaurants. He and his date meet at the grocery store and decide what meal they want to make. Then they buy the food and spend their evening together cooking and relaxing at home.

(MUSIC: "Glory of True Love")

People might be saving money on dates. But experts say lovers will still spend money on Valentine's Day. Faith Lapidus has more.

FAITH LAPIDUS:

The National Retail Federation says Americans will spend about one hundred dollars per person on flowers, chocolates, jewelry and other gifts. This is twenty dollars less than last year. The National Retail Federation says total spending for Valentine's Day goods this year is expected to reach more than fourteen billion dollars.

(MUSIC: "At Last")

Some activities this Valentine's Day are meant to save money. For example, in Norwalk, Connecticut, Justice of the Peace Mary Pugh is offering a free group marriage ceremony.

Judge Pugh told the local newspaper that she thinks the hard economic times are helping people realize what really is important in life. She said people are spending more time with family and friends and learning they do not need a lot of money to be with the ones they love.

The judge also said if the event is successful she may offer it again, next Valentine's Day.

(MUSIC: "Chapel of Love")

Another place people might want to consider getting married this Valentine's Day, or any other time, is the beautiful new Manhattan Marriage Bureau in New York City. 

City officials opened the new twelve million dollar space last month. It has two chapels where marriage ceremonies are held. It has a store that sells flowers, rings and other wedding necessities. It has dressing rooms for the brides. And it has beautiful artwork from the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

The New York City government hopes its new Marriage Bureau will compete with Las Vegas, Nevada as a place people will want to run away to for their wedding.  

(MUSIC: "Night and Day")

HOST:

I'm Doug Johnson. I hope you enjoyed our program today. It was written by Dana Demange and Caty Weaver, who also was the producer.

Join us again next week for AMERICAN MOSAIC, VOA's radio magazine in Special English.

 

 

引用 VOA News - Recession Cuts Into Valentine's Day, but Drives Demand for Love

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Steady Wave of Films Never Lets Us Forget

 

 

一波波電影 要我們永遠不忘納粹歷史

 

By A.O. Scott

 

This holiday season the movie theaters will be overrun with Nazis. A minor incursion of this sort is an annual Oscar-season tradition, but 2008 offers an unusually large cadre of prominent actors embodying the most profound and consequential evil of the recent past.
這個假期檔電影院將是納粹片充斥。這種類型電影小規模進軍戲院是每年奧斯卡季的傳統，但2008年由名演員詮釋呈現近代史上影響最深遠巨大的罪惡，陣仗之大，相當少見。

David Thewlis, playing a death camp commandant in “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” will be joined by Willem Dafoe, who takes on a similar role in “Adam Resurrected,” Paul Schrader’s new film. In “The Reader,” directed by Stephen Daldry and based on Bernhard Schlink’s best-selling novel of the same name, Kate Winslet plays a former concentration camp guard tried for war crimes. Tom Cruise, the star of Bryan Singer’s “Valkyrie,” portrays a patriotic German military officer involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler.
在「穿條紋衣的男孩」片中，大衛休里斯飾演死亡集中營的司令官；威廉達福在保羅史萊德的新片「甦醒的亞當」裡飾演類似的角色。史蒂芬戴爾卓執導的「我願意為妳朗讀」，根據徐林克的同名暢銷小說改編，凱特溫絲蕾飾演因戰爭罪名受審的前集中營警衛。湯姆克魯斯則是布來恩辛格的「代號：華爾奇麗雅」主角，飾演一個捲入暗殺希特勒計畫的德國愛國軍官。

Meanwhile the wave of European cinema dealing with Nazism and the Holocaust – including  “The Counterfeiters,” which won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film back in February – continued this fall with the American releases of “A Secret” and “One Day You’ll Understand,” two quiet, powerful French-language films exploring themes of memory and its suppression.
同時，處理納粹和納粹大屠殺猶太人的歐洲電影浪潮，今秋延續不墜，包括2月贏得奧斯卡最佳外語片獎的「偽鈔風暴」，以及在美國發行的「一個秘密」和「有一天妳會明白」，兩部溫和有力的法國電影，探索回憶與壓抑回憶的主題。

The near-simultaneous appearance of all these movies is to some degree a coincidence, but it throws into relief the curious fact that early 21st-century culture, in Europe and America, on screen and in books, is intensely, perhaps morbidly preoccupied with the great political trauma of the mid-20th century.
這些電影幾乎同步出現，某種程度上可以說是巧合，但也凸顯一個奇怪的事實，21世紀初的文化，在美國和歐洲，在銀幕上和書本裡，對20世紀中葉的政治大創傷的密切專注，或許已到病態的程度。

The number of Holocaust-related memoirs, novels, documentaries and feature films in the past decade or so seems to defy quantification, and their proliferation raises some uncomfortable questions. Why are there so many? Why now? And more queasily, could there be too many?
過去這10年左右，與納粹大屠殺猶太人相關的回憶錄、小說、紀錄片和劇情片不計其數，其擴散引發一些令人不安的問題。為什麼這麼多？為什麼是現在？令人更不自在的問題是：會不會太多了？

Shortly after the war the German critic T. W. Adorno declared that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” This observation has frequently been interpreted as a prohibition against the use of the ordinary tools of culture to address the extraordinary, inassimilable fact of genocide. But those tools, however crude, are what we have to work with.
二戰結束後不久，德國批評家阿多諾宣稱：「在奧許維茨（集中營）後，寫詩便是野蠻。」此一見解常被解讀為禁止用一般的文化手法處理非比尋常、無法消化的大屠殺事實。但那些手法，無論多麼粗糙，還是我們僅有的手法。

The perception that this catastrophe overwhelms conventional aesthetic strategies and traditions has led to the creation of a remarkable range of formally innovative work, including the lyric poetry of Paul Celan, the early prose works of Elie Wiesel, Claude Lanzmann’s epic documentary “Shoah,” Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” and Peter Eisenmann’s Berlin memorial to the Jewish victims of Nazism.
此一翻天覆地的大慘劇，使因襲的美學策略與傳統相形見絀的認知，已催生許多種形式創新的作品，包括保羅‧策蘭的抒情詩，埃利‧維瑟爾早期的散文，克勞德‧蘭茲曼史詩般的紀錄片「大屠殺」，亞特‧史畢格曼的「老鼠」，和彼得‧艾森曼在柏林的納粹屠殺猶太人紀念碑。

If the Holocaust can inspire a great work of art, then it can also open itself up, like everything else, to exploitation, pretense and vulgarity.
納粹屠殺猶太人既能激發偉大的藝術品，也會開拓自己的可能性，如同其他事物，被剝削、矯飾、淪為低級趣味。

Of course the line between kitsch and art is notoriously blurry, and in any case kitsch has its uses. The television miniseries “Holocaust” is nobody’s idea of a masterpiece, but its broadcast, in 1979, on West German state television was a decisive event in that nation’s reckoning with its culpability. It is estimated that more than half of the adult German population watched the series.
媚俗和藝術界線之模糊，確實惡名昭彰，總之媚俗仍有其用途。沒有人認為電視迷你影集系列「大屠殺」是曠世傑作，但1979年在西德國營電視台播出時，對當時在處理認罪問題的西德是個決定性的事件。估計超過半數德國成年人看過這部電視影集。

The French conscience may have been stirred by superior movies – “The Sorrow and the Pity,” “Shoah” – but France was much slower to acknowledge the full measure of its complicity.
法國人的良心也許被較優的電影「悲傷與憐憫」和「大屠殺」喚醒，但法國人完全承認自己和納粹勾結通敵，卻比德國慢了許多。

And in the United States “Schindler’s List” in 1993 was a similar watershed. Though the Holocaust was not a central event in American history, “Schindler’s List” made it into one. Buying a ticket was treated almost a moral duty, and its Oscar-night triumph was staged as a grand collective catharsis.
在美國，1993年的「辛德勒的名單」是類似的分水嶺。雖然納粹屠殺猶太人在美國歷史上原本並非主要事件，「辛德勒的名單」卻把大屠殺變成主要事件。買票捧場被視為道德義務，奧斯卡頒獎夜大捷變成盛大的集體心靈淨化。

“Schindler’s List,” for all its unsparing and powerful re-creations of the horror of the Krakow ghetto, is a story of heroism, resilience and survival. And a great many of the mainstream Holocaust movies that have followed have emphasized hope and overcoming rather than despair and destruction. When death dominates these films – as it does in “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” – it is rendered aesthetically palatable by an overlay of maudlin sentiment.
「辛德勒的名單」以嚴厲、強力的方式重塑格拉科猶太區的慘狀，是個關於英雄行為、韌性和生存的故事。接下來的許多好萊塢主流電影都強調希望與克服逆境，而非絕望與毀滅。當死亡成為像「穿條紋衣的男孩」這類電影的主題時，藉著感傷的情緒襯托，美學詮釋變成可以接受。

The Holocaust is more accessible than ever, and more entertaining. At the same time it is receding from living memory, which may by itself explain the recent burst of cinematic and literary interest. “A Secret” and “One Day You’ll Understand” are meditations on what it means to remember. In those films, full of unresolved feelings of grief, tenderness and bewilderment, French Jews born after World War II try to figure out what the annihilation of their parents’ world means to them.
納粹屠殺猶太人的事件比過去更容易接觸也更有娛樂性。同時，事件也自現存的記憶中消逝，這或許解釋了最近電影與文學作品蓬勃出現的原因。「一個秘密」和「有一天妳會明白」沉思回憶的意義。這些電影充滿猶疑未決的情緒：悲傷、親密和困惑，二戰後出生的法國猶太人試圖理解雙親所處的世界遭到滅絕意義何在。

In the United States the Holocaust is a mystery, a puzzle, and the obsessive interest in it testifies to its intrinsic strangeness. In France, in Germany and in Eastern Europe it remains an urgent problem that needs to be worked out – in art, in politics and in the society as a whole.
納粹屠殺猶太人在美國是個神秘事件，一個謎團，對此事的狂熱興趣證實其內在的古怪。在法國、德國和東歐，這仍是迫切需要解決的問題，在藝術、政治和社會整體皆然。

關鍵字句

 

 

作者一開始就玩文字遊戲，overrun 有侵略、猖獗的意思。例：Enemy soldiers had overrun the island. 剛好搭配納粹（Nazis）或：

The house was completely overrun with mice.

 

後面接incursion 也有遭入侵的意思，而且是外國軍隊。例：One supervisor said they were prepared to join with Kurds to resist a Turkish incursion into northern Iraq. 引申為進入其他領域：For some readers the book will be a first incursion into a strange territory. 作者把傾巢而出的納粹主題電影比喻為大軍壓境（美國電影院）。

 

 

與納粹大屠殺猶太人相關的（Holocaust-related） 的回憶錄（memoirs）、小說（novels）、紀錄片（documentaries） 和劇情片（feature films），過去十多年來似乎不計其數。Quantification 是「量化」，defy quantification 說的是數量太多，無法量化。

 

 

數量太多時引發令人不安（uncomfortable）的問題，作者在後面用了more queasily，這個字主要意思是讓人作嘔（causing nausea），但在這裡應解讀為「讓人不自在」（causing uneasiness），才能跟前面呼應。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/movies/23scot.html
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/25/arts/scott.php 

2008-12-02/聯合報/G9版/UNITED DAILY NEWS 張佑生 原文請見12月2日紐時周報十一版上

 

 

 

來源→http://city.udn.com/50132/3128737?tpno=0&cate_no=0

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